Fractal Time and Temporal Vertigo
by thesilversun
Summary: In the final days of the Last Great Time War time is fracturing, timelines buckle and blur. The Doctor tries to help.


Time was fracturing. Had fractured. Would fracture. All futures and pasts were true and all were a lie at the very same moment.

It's disorientating. A bad case of temporal vertigo if ever he'd had one. The Doctor closes his eyes, the sense of falling through time, all of time, in all directions, all at once, making him giddy.

It doesn't help.

Images race - have raced - will race - through his mind. All that once was, all that might now never have been. All that is, all that cannot be and all that might yet come to pass. A hundred million combinations. More. Infinitely more. For each action an opposite reaction. Time shattered and splitting into a myriad of fragments, a kaleidoscope of distorted and distorting time-streams.

Life. Death. Life. Death. Killer. Saviour. Warrior. Coward. He saved them. He doomed them. He abandoned them. He killed them. Murderer.

It's too much even for a mind as finely tuned to the ebb and flow of time as his. He cries out. It hurts. Why won't it stop?

So many faces, so many memories. Were they memories? He didn't trust himself to know. He couldn't focus on any of them. Were they from his past? A real past? Or a past that had never been? A past that due to actions he'd not yet taken would cease to be or perhaps would make it spring into being? Companions, friends, lovers even. Living. Dying. Knowing him. Never knowing him. Were they images of his future? A something nebulous that may or may not come to past. All just potentials in a fragmented time-stream?

Potential. It meant something. Would mean something. Had meant something. He can't think, couldn't think, will not think. The images pulse and dance around him, faster and faster. A whirling blur of twisted time-lines, the only linking factor the growing sense of overwhelming dread. He cries out again. Screams. His mind is burning. It's too much. Why won't anybody help him? Please. Somebody. Please. Please.

Nothing.

There's nothing.

Silence.

He lies on the floor and tries to remember how to breathe. His chest hurts. The jagged scar that across it aches. It's the only reminder left now of how his second heart had been removed and how it had eventually grown back. How he survived that he never knew. It shouldn't have been possible. That whole time shouldn't have been possible. He thinks he probably only managed to survive out of sheer annoyance at the idea of it being impossible. He'd done the impossible a dozen times, and he'd do it again just to spite those who said he can't.

There's a hand against his cheek, too large and warm to be his own. It's human, the fingers tips rough from long years of strumming cords, the skin carries the faint scent of tobacco. He forces himself to look. To confirm or deny which time-line he's in.

For a split second he can see himself through Fitz's eyes. Face graven with exhaustion, deathly pale skin and dishevelled curls, but worse are his eyes, wide and utterly terrified. Then he's back inside his own head, he's looking up at Fitz, whose all angles and stubble, and big grey eyes and concern.

"You okay?" Fitz's asks, in a voice that the Doctor knew he'd out right deny was shaking.

With what he's just seen the Doctor thinks he might never be alright again. A laugh, utterly inappropriate really given the circumstances, bubbles up inside him. It spills out as something broken as time itself.

Fitz gathers him into his arms and kneels on the polished stone floor of chamber, holding him close, trying to soothe him like its the most natural thing in the world.

Perhaps is, the Doctor thinks, because it's not the first time. Nor will it be the last, not now that Gallifrey is so close to falling.

It hasn't fallen yet however, so for now there is hope. Even if that frail hope is tearing him apart.

It hangs in a shaft of late evening sunlight, the second sun having dipped low behind the Citadel. An innocuous little blue-green crystal suspended between two hair-thin wires. The Potential.

A relic from the earliest days of Gallifrey, it was said those who could control it shape the future, could by force of will alone force their world past, present and future down the most favourable timestreams. Whether it could, whether any Time Lord actually had the control to do so, had long been argued. They'd been theoretical arguments of course, what other kind had their been years before when he'd been at the academy? How they'd bored and frustrated him. Who would have thought things would have got so desperate that it would be seen as the means to possibly salvation.

If he can ever master it that is. If it doesn't kill him first. Given some of what he's seen maybe even that would be a kindness.

Fitz talks to him of how a quick rest and tea will have him back to his old self in no time. It's lies, but he loves him for telling them anyway.

His legs feel weak and he leans into Fitz, grateful for the support as he helps him to his feet. His whole body aches these days and when he sleeps, which he has to all too frequently now, it does nothing to relieve it. It's failing. He's known it for a long time, he thinks Fitz's knows it too, but neither will give it voice. They are all on borrowed time now in every sense of the phrase.

The less that was said about what passed for tea on Gallifrey the better. He wishes for a moment they could go back to Earth. Just a quick trip, an afternoon, a even couple of hours would do. They could go to a little teashop, by the sea would be nice, a perfect summers days sometime in the early 1930's and then-

He stops. They can't. Maybe they never will. Maybe they never have.

The fact is nobody will ever do that or anything else ever again unless he finds a way to end it, to end the war that is eating up the whole of time and space. Perhaps it's arrogance to think that he is the only one left capable of doing so or maybe it is desperation. Perhaps it doesn't even matter any more. It will have to end one way or another, and it will have to happen soon.

"Tomorrow." His voice sounds odd to his own ears. Weak and but not yet quite defeated, not yet. "I'll try again tomorrow."

Beside him Fitz sighs sadly, holds him a little tighter, and pointedly says nothing. Whatever happens, however it finally ends, they both know he'll still be there all the same.

 **Note.** Strange, angsty and disjointed as anything, this little fic wouldn't leave me alone until I'd written it.It comes from me watching the Night of the Doctor mini-episode. Yeah, there wasn't going to be anything happy come from that. But the thing that struck me was that none of the companions from the EDAs were mentioned, only those from the Big Finish Audios.

So anyway my brain goes to alternate time-lines, temporal fluxes and general weirdness, which to be honest some of the EDAs were extremely weird, so it sort of fits.

The Potential crystal is something that I've made up.

I will now try to get back to getting the next part of Last of the Rift Born done.


End file.
